Collaboration has become a key feature of modern software, allowing teams to work together effectively in real-time while in different locations. In order for a user to communicate their intention to several distributed peers, computing devices must exchange high-frequency updates with transient metadata like mouse position, text range highlights, and temporary comments. Current peer-to-peer awareness solutions have high time and space complexity due to the ever-expanding logs that each client must maintain in order to ensure robust collaboration in eventually consistent environments. This paper proposes an awareness Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type (CRDT) library that provides the tooling to support an eventually consistent, decentralized, and robust multi-user collaborative environment. Our library is tuned for rapid iterative updates that communicate fine-grained user actions across a network of collaborators. Our approach holds memory constant for subsequent writes to an existing key on a shared resource and completely prunes stale data from shared documents. These features allow us to keep the CRDT's memory footprint small, making it a feasible solution for memory constrained applications. Results show that our CRDT implementation is comparable to or exceeds the performance of similar data structures in high-frequency read/write scenarios.
","abstract_html":"<p>Collaboration has become a key feature of modern software, allowing teams to work together effectively in real-time while in different locations. In order for a user to communicate their intention to several distributed peers, computing devices must exchange high-frequency updates with transient metadata like mouse position, text range highlights, and temporary comments. Current peer-to-peer awareness solutions have high time and space complexity due to the ever-expanding logs that each client must maintain in order to ensure robust collaboration in eventually consistent environments. This paper proposes an awareness Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type (CRDT) library that provides the tooling to support an eventually consistent, decentralized, and robust multi-user collaborative environment. Our library is tuned for rapid iterative updates that communicate fine-grained user actions across a network of collaborators. Our approach holds memory constant for subsequent writes to an existing key on a shared resource and completely prunes stale data from shared documents. These features allow us to keep the CRDT's memory footprint small, making it a feasible solution for memory constrained applications. Results show that our CRDT implementation is comparable to or exceeds the performance of similar data structures in high-frequency read/write scenarios.</p>","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Waidhofer, John C"],"institution":null,"degree_name":"MS in Computer Science","degree_level":null,"degree_discipline":"Computer Science","degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Maria Pantoja","Computer Science","College of Engineering"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2023,"date_issued":"2023-03-01T08:00:00Z","date_published":"2023-03-01T08:00:00Z","updated_at":"2026-07-24T01:32:29Z","subjects":["Distributed Computing","Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type","Collaboration","Computational Engineering","Data Storage Systems","Digital Communications and Networking"],"languages":[],"rights":[],"rights_urls":[],"identifier_entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["10.15368/theses.2023.2"],"render_values":[{"text":"10.15368/theses.2023.2","href":"https://doi.org/10.15368/theses.2023.2","code":true}]}]},"links":{"outbound_url":"https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/theses/2654","outbound_label":"Repository record","outbound_source":"dc:identifier"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor","label":"Contributor","values":["Maria Pantoja","Computer Science","College of Engineering"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Waidhofer, John C"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date.available","label":"Dc Date Available","values":["2023-03-18T07:00:00Z"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_discipline","label":"Discipline","values":["Computer Science"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_name","label":"Degree Name","values":["MS in Computer Science"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["Distributed Computing","Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type","Collaboration","Computational Engineering","Data Storage Systems","Digital Communications and Networking"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/theses/2654","10.15368/theses.2023.2"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description.abstract","label":"Abstract","values":["Collaboration has become a key feature of modern software, allowing teams to work together effectively in real-time while in different locations. In order for a user to communicate their intention to several distributed peers, computing devices must exchange high-frequency updates with transient metadata like mouse position, text range highlights, and temporary comments. Current peer-to-peer awareness solutions have high time and space complexity due to the ever-expanding logs that each client must maintain in order to ensure robust collaboration in eventually consistent environments. This paper proposes an awareness Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type (CRDT) library that provides the tooling to support an eventually consistent, decentralized, and robust multi-user collaborative environment. Our library is tuned for rapid iterative updates that communicate fine-grained user actions across a network of collaborators. Our approach holds memory constant for subsequent writes to an existing key on a shared resource and completely prunes stale data from shared documents. These features allow us to keep the CRDT's memory footprint small, making it a feasible solution for memory constrained applications. Results show that our CRDT implementation is comparable to or exceeds the performance of similar data structures in high-frequency read/write scenarios.
"]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["Shelfaware: Accelerating Collaborative Awareness with Shelf CRDT"]}]}],"canonical_facts":{"dc:contributor":["Maria Pantoja","Computer Science","College of Engineering"],"dc:creator":["Waidhofer, John C"],"dc:date.available":["2023-03-18T07:00:00Z"],"dc:description.abstract":["Collaboration has become a key feature of modern software, allowing teams to work together effectively in real-time while in different locations. In order for a user to communicate their intention to several distributed peers, computing devices must exchange high-frequency updates with transient metadata like mouse position, text range highlights, and temporary comments. Current peer-to-peer awareness solutions have high time and space complexity due to the ever-expanding logs that each client must maintain in order to ensure robust collaboration in eventually consistent environments. This paper proposes an awareness Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type (CRDT) library that provides the tooling to support an eventually consistent, decentralized, and robust multi-user collaborative environment. Our library is tuned for rapid iterative updates that communicate fine-grained user actions across a network of collaborators. Our approach holds memory constant for subsequent writes to an existing key on a shared resource and completely prunes stale data from shared documents. These features allow us to keep the CRDT's memory footprint small, making it a feasible solution for memory constrained applications. Results show that our CRDT implementation is comparable to or exceeds the performance of similar data structures in high-frequency read/write scenarios.
"],"dc:identifier":["https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/theses/2654","10.15368/theses.2023.2"],"dc:subject":["Distributed Computing","Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type","Collaboration","Computational Engineering","Data Storage Systems","Digital Communications and Networking"],"dc:title":["Shelfaware: Accelerating Collaborative Awareness with Shelf CRDT"],"thesis:degree_discipline":["Computer Science"],"thesis:degree_name":["MS in Computer Science"]},"updated_at":"2026-07-24T01:32:29Z"}